HorsesAss.Org

Open Thread 2/13

by — ,

– Blue-green alliances.

– I’m as big a McGinn supporter as you’ll find and I agree with most of this. But I don’t think either the business community or Occupy Seattle are very happy with his handling of Occupy Seattle.

– And keep in mind; we’re not talking about abortion anymore. We’re talking about birth control.

– Obama’s Spotify playlist is pretty pedestrian.

– United States Bureau of Chronology

Comments

  1. 1

    So, You Want Deficit Reduction?

    Then vote Democrat:

    “President Obama’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year, FY2013, will be delivered to Congress on Monday. Obama will propose that millionaires pay a minimum tax rate of 30 percent and will project a budget deficit of $901 billion in FY2013, representing 5.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), down from $1.33 trillion, or 8.5 percent of GDP this year, White House officials say.”

    http://nbcpolitics.msnbc.msn.c.....t-proposal

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: As I pointed out in the preceding thread, the rich are undertaxed, when you consider all the taxes paid to government, not just income taxes, which is the only fair way to look at it. Republicans say they want a flat tax. Well, here’s their chance. President Obama’s budget proposal won’t make the tax burden flat, but it’ll make it a little flatter, which is a step in the right direction. It’ll also bring down the deficit, both in absolute dollars and in percentage terms, which is something else that Republicans say they want.

    But if Republicans win significant electoral victories this fall we’ll get neither flatter taxes nor lower deficits, because what Republicans say they want and what they really want are two different things.

    What Republicans really want is more tax breaks for the already-undertaxed rich. That will make our tax system even more regressive, and it’ll increase our deficits. If you want fairer taxes and lower deficits, vote Democrat.

  2. 2

    Republicans decry “bloated” government but the truth is the federal government has laid off more workers over the last 5 years than any private employer.

    http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.co.....-uncle-sam

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: So much for the rightwing bullshit that public employment is comfortable, well-paid, lifetime sinecure. But then, they’ve known that all along; we’ve never seen the bleating apologists for the pampered rich get in line for those “cushy” government jobs, have we? Ever wonder why that is? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that public employers have to work harder for less pay — and don’t have any more job security than people in the private sector.

  4. 4

    The news of the House “Technical Corrections” to the transportation bill is, well, outragious.

    The House tried to slip through “technical corrections” which appear designed to profit mostly Fed Ex and a few other favored companies which operate under the Railway Labor Act. Included would be to fire workers on Amtrack trains and replace them with non-union contract workers. In addition, all food and beverage service on Amtrack trains would be out-sourced, but with a provision guaranteeing any contractor of profitability (i.e., corporate socialism).

    Other provisions remove overtime rules and pay to workers, including truck drivers covered by the act (mostly Fed Ex), and assert federal supremecy over the subject (i.e., no state laws can provide greater safety protections). It also allows drivers and trucks under the act to run bigger trucks regardless of state law.

    Last year, Fed Ex spent three times the amount that UPS spent on lobbying. It looks like they got what they paid for.

    And, of course, Boener is insisting – with a straight face – that the act is a “clean one” with no special priviledges.

    Transportation Bill Strips Workers of Pay Protections

  5. 5

    Democracy demands an educated electorate. Education should, and sometimes does, teach people how to think, and once they do, they often become less reactionary and more far-thinking. The more educated people are, the more they tend Democratic. The less educated folks tend to vote in black and white soundbites, often inspired by fear or hate.

    Just sayin….

  6. 6

    re 5: The low information voter also supports many reactionary positions because of patriotism and love for the constitution — which they have apparently learned through some kind of time-travelling osmosis that informs them of the founding father’s intentions — without ever having read the original document.

  7. 7

    @4
    The house transportation bill has gone from bad, to worse, to just obscene. But, I wouldn’t worry about it, it will never clear the senate or get the presidential pen put to it in it’s present form.

    The house Republicans are just being stupid.

  8. 8

    Guns Don’t Kill People Dep’t

    “An armed society is a polite society,” the NRA tells us. Yeah, right:

    “Two people suffered gunshot wounds … at a north Everett restaurant … while the restaurant was closing, three men were unhappy about being told to leave … [and] had to be escorted out the door by on-site security … one of the men went to a car parked nearby and retrieved a handgun ….”

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46.....verett_wa/

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: Maybe the victims should sue the NRA for false advertising.

  9. 9

    @7 “The house Republicans are just being stupid.”

    No, they’re being obstructionist. They know this’ll kill it. The continued lack of a transportation bill is their fault for putting poison pills in it.

  10. 10

    The less educated folks tend to vote in black and white soundbites, often inspired by fear or hate.

    Again, our trolls, (now down to yd(iot) and maximus asshat), to a tee.

  11. 11

    House GOP leaders, seeing the writing on the wall, apparently have agreed to extend unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut without extracting spending concessions from Democrats. But they couldn’t do it without calling Democrats “obstructionists.”

    In other political news, President Obama’s campaign has set up a “Truth Squad” to debunk GOP smears, and Ricky Sanitarium now leads Mittster in national polls of GOP voters.

  12. 12

    Wisconsin Update

    Gov. Scott Walker announced he will use Wisconsin’s share of the mortgage settlement, which is intended to help homeowners, to lessen the state’s budget shortfall.

    http://www.showmeprogress.com/

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: This is so typical of Walker. Last year, he extracted $130 million of salary and pension givebacks from teachers and other public workers, then turned around and gave a $126 million tax cut to manufacturers.

  13. 13

    @12…and probably pocketed (or enabled his cronies to pocket) the remaining $4 million.

  14. 14

    Re: McGinn’s reputation among Occupy Seattle, in response to Dave Meinert’s Publicola post, I wrote:

    Dave wrote, “Next, [McGinn] deftly handled the Occupy Seattle Protests, preserving his credibility with an almost impossible-to-please trio: The Occupy Seattle movement, the SPD, and downtown businesses.”
    As someone who spent about six hours per day at Westlake Park in October and has taken notes at about 50 Occupy Seattle general assemblies, I can say with confidence that Mayor McGinn did not preserve his credibility with Occupy Seattle. He displayed an inability or unwillingness to keep the police under control, he lied about related street permits (*), and he lied about inviting Occupy Seattle activists up to his office after they arrived at City Hall and were told that he was not there.
    * On October 9, 2011, Mike McGinn wrote, “SPD granted permits on the fly for the Saturday evening march.” Public records requests reveal that neither Seattle Police Department, nor Seattle Department of Transportation, nor even the Office of the Mayor has any record of such permits.

  15. 15

    Heh. Just snagged a copy of Joe McGinnis’s “The Rogue”.. Where else could someone like Sarah Palin come from? Where else but from what Norman Mailer called “the American Nightmare”:

    It used to be said that Wasilla was a trading outpost bounded by two lakes: Wasilla Lake and Lake Lucille. Now it’s a city of 7,028 located between Chili’s and Wendy’s and stuffed to the gills with stores such as Wal-Mart, Sears, Target, Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Fred Meyer, and enough small-fry evangelical Christian churches to make Jesus himself weep from the effort of trying to count them all.

    I don’t exaggerate. There are the Wasilla Bible Church, Wasilla Assembly of God, Church on the Rock (all three of which Sarah Palin has attended), Sunny Knik Chapel, King’s Chapel Alaska, Abundant Life Church, Wasilla Lake Church-Nazarene, Mat-Su Evangelical Covenant Church, Wasilla Christian Church, Wasilla Community Church of God, King of Kings Evangelical Lutheran Church, Fairview Loop Baptist Church, Faith Chapel Pentecostal Church of God, New Life Presbyterian Church, Valley Church of Christ, Apostolic Worship Center, Independent Baptist Church of Wasilla, Glad Tidings Full Gospel Church, Church of Christ at Wasilla, Mid Valley Christian Center, Meadow Lakes Christian Center, Word of Faith Assembly, Frontier Christian Ministries, Big Lake Baptist Church, Pilgrims Baptist Church, Northern Lights Mennonite Church, Trailhead Wesleyan Church, Valley Open Bible Fellowship, Bread of Life Church of Mat-Su, Word of Life International Ministries, Slavic Evangelical Church Nadezhda, Gospel Outreach Christian Center, West Valley Family Church of the Nazarene, Christian Fellowship of Wasilla, Pioneer Christian Fellowship, Independent Baptist Church, Settlers Bay Community Church, Faith Bible Fellowship, Valley Christian Conference, North Bear Street Community Church, Valley Sovereign Grace Baptist Assembly, Birch Harbor Baptist Church, Schrock Road Community Church, and Crossroads Community Church, not to mention another dozen or more Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Seventh-Day Adventist, Mormon, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Russian Orthodox, and Jehovah’s Witness churches, and at least another twenty-five or thirty just down the road in Palmer.

    There are no synagogues in Wasilla, but there are more than thirty-five chiropractors, or approximately one for every two hundred residents.

    Wow! No wonder the Mat-Su valley is known as “the mad zoo”.

  16. 16

    We need to remind voters 24/7 every time the Republicans put their wingnut ideas to the forefront. The public needs to be reminded that without the Democrats protecting them, Republicans would do away with all minimum wage, overtime, and worker safety laws.

  17. 17

    # 15: I remember back in Tennessee there were a few big churches and the rest seemed to top out at about thirty adults. This made it very hard on church finances, there weren’t enough members to support a full-time pastor, so most had day jobs. I never could figure out why you didn’t have more churches with several hundred adults attending – for some reason people would stay and others would go, but the total number seemed to stay about the same. I guess they liked the personal contacts they had with such a small congregation.

  18. 18

    RR @ #8: I saw last week a blub on the news about a shooting in a community in north-eastern Tennessee. That’s mountain country, and just about everyone owns firearms there. Anybody, a woman was “de-friended” on Facebook, and her father got revenge by driving to the other woman’s home, shooting the woman and her husband – all in front of their toddler.

  19. 19

    Somehow we missed that today, February 13 2012 was the day that the equal right for all citizens to marry became law in the state of Washington.

    Kudos to our Governor and our legislature for finding a way to get this done and ending needless bigoted discrimination.

    And BRAVO to Sen. Ed Murray for carrying the torch and crossing the finish line.

    Washingtonians can be very proud today. very.

  20. 20

    Let’s face it, we need to get some better trolls hear. YD and Emperer mini-mind just aren’t providing the intellectual competition we need to keep our skills sharp. One just jumps in to post a short Fox News talking point (which are blatantly false in so many ways), and then disapears. The other just jumps in to throw insults, and also dissapears.

    At least with Piper we could get into a good argument from time-to-time.

    Unfortunately, most seem to run off after they get their buts kicked (intellectually). Maybe we shoul promise to be kinder to them?

  22. 22

    @20
    Maybe we should take turns being “Troll For a Week”. We could rotate the assignment, and when on, do our level best to provide an intelligent and well thought critique of liberal/leftist/Democratic positions, from our best impersonation of a conservative POV.

  23. 23

    # 1: The Republicans have never wanted deficit reduction. After having run up a deficit, they then complain about it as soon as a Democrate gets into office, insisting it’s the biggest problem we face. Then when they get back in office, they run it back up again.

    If you don’t believe me, read David Stockman’s book (Reagan’s first budget director). He was rather naive and believed it when he was told that Reagan wanted to balance the budget. But he said that spending reduction attempts were stopped by Reagan and the Reagan cabinet.

    Everything except welfare was “off the table”. They were reduced to calling ketsup a “vegitable” to try to stay in compliance with school lunch laws (sound familiar?).

    In the meantime, he was told to “assume” that the Lafler Curve would produce so much revenue that the budget would balance itself within just a few years. It didn’t happen, of course, because the Laffler Curve was an idiotic theory. But that didn’t stop George W. Bush from using the same tactics to try to cut taxes and prosecute two wars at the same time.

  24. 24

    Alaska, according to maximus asshat troll, is a “beautiful place”. I agree in part. But Alaska is also a place where Americans escape to “live free”:

    IN 1987, Wasilla elected a new mayor: John Stein, a lifelong Alaskan, born in Sitka, and the holder of a degree in city planning from the University of Oregon.

    Stein had arrived as city planner in 1984. Given the appearance of the city today, the notion of a Wasilla city planner may seem oxymoronic, but Stein says things could have been worse. “Those old forty-acre homesteads were being subdivided into one-acre lots,” he told me when I visited him at his home in Sitka during the summer of 2010. “Anchorage was overflowing, and people were flocking to the Valley because it was cheap. And it was cheap: cheap, cheap, cheap. There were essentially no building codes and no minimum standard for borough roads.”

    Speaking of his first term in office, Stein says, “It was the first time they’d had a planner as mayor. I tried to bring things under control. It was the first time anybody there had ever heard the phrase ‘comprehensive plan for development.’ Until then, it was still the frontier. You could say I’m responsible for the commercial strip on the Parks Highway, and I’ll plead guilty. But by allowing that, I protected the city’s residential neighborhoods.”

    John Stein was reelected, uncontroversially, in 1990. By then Wasilla was a city in chaos, plagued by both substance and spousal abuse—the two not being entirely unrelated. Homeschooling was on the rise, and not only because parents feared exposing their children to the evils of secular education. A child who went to school could talk about how daddy had beaten up mommy the night before, or display his or her own bruises.

    Intact nuclear families were a minority. One year, a fourth-grade teacher attempted a genealogy project. The first step was for the students to list their grandparents. He had to abandon the project because many students literally did not know what a grandparent was. Indeed, many, while knowing the woman they lived with, were unsure if she was their birth mother; nor were they certain if the man in the house was their father.

    From Joe McGinnis’ “The Rogue”…

    Small-town life.. Keep up appearances and behind closed doors – anything goes.

  25. 25

    OH MY! This damn book is a hoot! Regarding Palin’s run for Mayor of Wasilla:

    Ignoring the bike paths, Sarah focused the secular aspect of her campaign on two issues: closing hours for local bars and liberalization of Alaska’s already lenient gun laws.

    In regard to the bars, the issue was whether to allow them to remain open until 5:00 AM or require them to close at 2:00, as did the bars in Anchorage. Both Stein and Wasilla’s first police chief, Irl Stambaugh, advocated the earlier closing.

    “What was happening,” Stambaugh told me during the summer of 2010, “was half the drunks in Anchorage would drive up here at two AM and get drunker for another three hours and then try to drive home. We were getting kind of tired of scraping them off the Parks Highway. I was also concerned with the number of women who were calling our domestic abuse hotline just after five o’clock in the morning saying, ‘Help, quick, my husband just came in and he’s trying to kill me!’ ”

    To Stein[the incumbent Wasilla mayor], a 2:00 AM closing “seemed like a no-brainer, what with the epidemic of drunk driving plaguing us, and especially in a city with such a strong Baptist and fundamentalist presence.”

    You’d think an evangelical Christian mother such as Sarah would have agreed. You’d be wrong. The bar owners argued that the hours between 2:00 and 5:00 AM were particularly lucrative and that city government didn’t have the right to interfere with free enterprise. Sarah wholeheartedly agreed. She saw the bill that would mandate a 2:00 AM closing as a classic example of government interference with personal freedom.

    The bar owners rivaled the right-wing Christian churches as the largest donors to Sarah’s campaign. Big jars into which Palin campaign donations could be placed appeared on all Wasilla bars and were filled to the brim nightly. In the same saloons, pictures of incumbent mayor Stein were placed inside the urinals.

    Shoot! Did this country dodge a mortar shell with this power-mad woman!

  26. 26

    OH MY! This damn book is a hoot! Regarding Palin’s run for Mayor of Wasilla:

    Ignoring the bike paths, Sarah focused the secular aspect of her campaign on two issues: closing hours for local bars and liberalization of Alaska’s already lenient gun laws.

    In regard to the bars, the issue was whether to allow them to remain open until 5:00 AM or require them to close at 2:00, as did the bars in Anchorage. Both Stein and Wasilla’s first police chief, Irl Stambaugh, advocated the earlier closing.

    “What was happening,” Stambaugh told me during the summer of 2010, “was half the drunks in Anchorage would drive up here at two AM and get drunker for another three hours and then try to drive home. We were getting kind of tired of scraping them off the Parks Highway. I was also concerned with the number of women who were calling our domestic abuse hotline just after five o’clock in the morning saying, ‘Help, quick, my husband just came in and he’s trying to kill me!’ ”

    To Stein [the incumbent Wasilla mayor], a 2:00 AM closing “seemed like a no-brainer, what with the epidemic of drunk driving plaguing us, and especially in a city with such a strong Baptist and fundamentalist presence.”

    You’d think an evangelical Christian mother such as Sarah would have agreed. You’d be wrong. The bar owners argued that the hours between 2:00 and 5:00 AM were particularly lucrative and that city government didn’t have the right to interfere with free enterprise. Sarah wholeheartedly agreed. She saw the bill that would mandate a 2:00 AM closing as a classic example of government interference with personal freedom.

    The bar owners rivaled the right-wing Christian churches as the largest donors to Sarah’s campaign. Big jars into which Palin campaign donations could be placed appeared on all Wasilla bars and were filled to the brim nightly. In the same saloons, pictures of incumbent mayor Stein were placed inside the urinals.

    Shoot! Did this country dodge a mortar shell with this power-mad woman!

  28. 28

    LMFAO..

    such a funny post from man-crush-john-edwards-ylb…..

    the big difference is that the two stories you posted have not turned out to be true..while your man-crush-john-edwards story was full on TEH TROOF!

    way to own yourself, bleeder…

    how is your man-crush going? teh gehy….

  29. 29

    @20

    poor idiot RHPee, still things Reepooblikan helicopters are hovering over his house and agents live under his bed.

    he could the most paranoid poster here…

  30. 30

    @10

    if I saw the world as black and white as you claim, I would be as poor as your are.

    jealousy burritos…its whats for dinner at the bleeder household…

  31. 31

    the two stories you posted have not turned out to be true.

    Heh.. I see no proof of that from you. How’s happy hour going?

    Telling any jokes about tacos, burritos or…

    watermelon?

    Goes down good with a shot of Pendleton right?

  33. 33

    sorry chumpy, no Pendleton tonight.

    just spaghetti.

    funny you talk fear and hate, its the only thing spewing out of left-nuts like you and rujaxoff.

    scared and jealous…its who you are…its why you hate anyone better off than you..

    go back to your basement

  35. 35

    No Nukes Are Good Nukes

    I’ve said before on this blog that I oppose building any new nuclear power plants in the U.S. because the nuclear industry can’t be trusted — and neither can the government bureacrats who are supposed to regular them. This MSNBC story reaffirms my view:

    “The federal government’s nuclear watchdog has faulted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for failing to follow through on safety agreements with nuclear facilities, saying its system for tracking corrective action raises questions about its oversight of nuclear safety and security.”

    http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_n.....nforcement

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: We know what happens to whistleblowers who expose safety lapses by contractors, operators, and overseers. We know some of these plants aren’t safe. So why should we, the public, allow the government to issue licenses and allow contractors to build these radiation-leaking monstrosities? More electricity to run more popcorn poppers just isn’t worth the risks.

  36. 36

    A perspective on Queen Sarah from an Alaskan Christian right winger:

    FOR ME, it’s back to work. I drive to Palmer, fifteen miles across the Valley, for a 3:00 PM meeting with Zane Henning, a Christian conservative and former North Slope oil worker who filed an ethics complaint against Sarah in November 2008, charging that she was using state property to promote her national political career.

    He based that complaint mostly on an interview Sarah did with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News on November 11, 2008, from her governor’s office in Anchorage. When asked about her plans for 2012, Sarah said, “Faith is a very big part of my life. And putting my life in my creator’s hands—this is what I always do. I’m like, okay, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I’m like, don’t let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is. Even if it’s cracked up a little bit, maybe I’ll plow right on through that and maybe prematurely plow through it, but don’t let me miss an open door. And if there is an open door in ’12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I’ll plow through that door.”

    Henning later filed a second complaint, charging that Sarah had improperly billed the state per diem costs for days when she worked out of her Wasilla home.

    A stocky man who’s obviously spent a lot of time outdoors, Henning meets me at Vagabond Blues, the downtown coffee and sandwich shop where just about everybody meets everybody in Palmer. He’s known Sarah since childhood. Chuck Heath was his sixth-grade teacher. He remembers Chuck coming in the first day and telling the students to forget the curriculum for the year: they weren’t going to waste time on stuff like English and history and math. They were going to study the only subject that really mattered—the great Alaskan outdoors.

    “If you were an outdoorsy kid, he was the greatest teacher you could have,” Henning says. “But if you were any kind of bookworm, it must have been a very long year. He didn’t hesitate to make fun of boys he didn’t think were manly enough, and the only girls he paid attention to were the pretty ones.”

    Henning was friends with Sarah’s younger sister, Molly, but as for Sarah herself, he says, “She gave me the willies from the get-go. She was always standoffish, and if she didn’t get her way she was a bully.”

  37. 37

    And..

    Moving back to Wasilla in 1989, after several years in southwestern Alaska, Henning found the adult Sarah not much different from the child. “Todd and I hit it off okay—we were both fishermen and we could talk about snow machines—but Sarah still had this clique-y high-schoolish thing going, and my wife didn’t like her, so we never really socialized.”

    Even so, Henning voted for her for mayor. “I had joined the Last Frontier Foundation, which was all about more conservative, smaller government, and I was a Christian and I knew she was, too, so it was a pretty easy choice.”

    It was also one he soon regretted. “She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know the first thing. She had to hire a business manager to run the city because she didn’t know how. And then she spent fifty thousand dollars remodeling her office without getting city council approval.”

    Henning approached her one night at a social gathering. “It was at Harry and Whitney’s house—they live in Utah now—and I asked her about the remodeling. She said how dare I ever question her! Just like that. Boom. From that point forward the door was closed for conversation.”
    With increasing dismay, Henning watched Sarah spend $15 million to build a new sports center on land the city didn’t own. “She wanted to prove she was a hockey mom, but to me that wasn’t being conservative.”

  38. 38

    And best of all…

    Once she became governor, Henning turned into an outright gadfly, requesting copies of state e-mails that, he said, showed Sarah was doing state business on private accounts to avoid public scrutiny.

    “She’d promised open and transparent, but that was just another of her lies. And Todd was copied on everything. He was supposed to be working for BP, a company with which the state is doing business. But she’s copying him on confidential documents regarding oil and gas. How can you say that’s ethical?

    “Listen, I used to see Todd up on the slope. Even after I filed my ethics complaints, he never pointed a finger at me. He’s a wimp. He makes me sick. People say he’s a man’s man? I’d love to grab him by the neck and beat the shit out of him.”

    “That doesn’t sound very Christian,” I say.
    Henning laughs. “I know. Todd and Sarah bring out the worst in me. I’ve got to be careful to not let myself grow too spiteful. But she’s the one who gets the Christian perspective all wrong. Look at this hatred for Obama. Is that being a true Christian? I’m a conservative and I oppose his big-government policies, but I don’t try to incite hate. And her so-called family values? After the way she’s neglected her own kids? She’s too narcissistic to care about her kids. It’s always ‘me, me, me,’ and everybody else is always wrong. She’s so narcissistic she couldn’t even care for a pet. And that’s true. Linda Menard gave her a puppy named Agia. She got rid of it because she couldn’t be bothered to care for it.

    “Name one thing she’s done—just one—that reflects a truly caring, Christian heart. She’s never volunteered for charity. Habitat for Humanity? The United Way? Even Christian-sponsored charities. Take a look at her tax returns. Do you see any donations? Do you see even a dime? No, what you see is them trying to get out of paying property tax on that cabin they built on Safari Lake.”

    These are strong words to be uttered in a venue as mellow as Vagabond Blues on such a spirit-lifting spring afternoon.

    “It’s time for strong speech,” Henning says. “She’s running for president. And I need to find a way to make the religious-right hard core understand that she’s not what she says she is. I used to go to Assembly of God. When I was a kid, I watched them speak in tongues. I don’t know what Sarah has taken away from her experiences there, but it’s twisted. She’s twisted. And you’ve managed to show that already, without having written a word.”

    Henning has to leave. He’s heading for the Gulf of Mexico to work on cleaning up the BP oil spill. I walk him out to his truck. He unlocks it and takes two guns off the front seat. One is a Glock. I don’t recognize the other one.

    “Take your choice,” Henning says. “Or take them both, if you want.”

    “No, thanks,” I say. “I walk in peace.”

    “So do I,” he says, “but you’re living next door to the Palins.”

  39. 39

    Queen Sarah’s ghostwriter gaffes:

    JOHN WOODEN has died and Sarah commemorates the passing of the former UCLA basketball coach on Twitter: “You shall be missed dearly, and we shall remember your lessons.”

    This brings to mind Sarah’s paean to Wooden’s wisdom as recounted in Going Rogue. “Ever since we were kids, Todd and I have looked at Coach John Wooden as a true hero. His quotes plastered our bulletin boards, school notebooks, and locker doors.” She gives an example: “Our land is everything to us … I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it—with their lives.”

    It’s not clear where Sarah had that particular quote “plastered,” but it is clear that John Wooden never uttered those words. They come from a 1960 essay entitled “Back on the War Ponies,” written by Native American activist John Wooden Legs and reprinted in 2003 in We Are the People: Voices from the Other Side of American History. This can happen when your ghostwriter gets careless while Googling inspirational quotes.

  40. 40

    There are a lot of Republicans out there, and they come in many shapes and sizes. You have the red-meat bigots, who are poor and want to blame it on other people who are just struggling to get by – blacks, hispanics, union and government workers, etc. Then you have the middle-class Republicans who have become convinced that by catching onto the Republican star they can be propelled to upper-middle class (or higher). Then you have the upper middle class – some doctors, lawyers, accountants – who still work for a living but don’t want to pay taxes any higher than they paid when they were a student.

    But then you have the guys who really control the Republican Party – the financial elites, and their minions. You can see they really control the party by the tax cuts for the wealthy which every recent President (except George H.W. Bush) rammed through right after they took office – all other priorities be damned. You can see it in the appointments they make, including Supreme Court justices who think corporations have the same rights as living people, and useful idiots like “Brownie” who will assist while their own agency is dismantled and sub-contracted out for profit on no-bid contracts.

    But if you have any remaining doubts, all you have to do is listen when they talk among themselves:

    “We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go…We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it…Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen…”

    — Grover Norquist at CPAC

  41. 41

    # 29: I see Emperor Mini-Mind has changed his handle again to Edward Teach.

    And, as usual, he can’t construct a rational argument, he just calls people names like a third-grader. And even then he gets it wrong, it’s obvious he didn’t read or comprehend the post (# 20) he’s trying to complain about.

    Gee, when I said we needed new trolls, I meant NEW TROLLS, not just the same ones changing their names over and over again.

  42. 42

    I guess I’m not the only one sharing this opinion…

    “…(T)he long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the GOP has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as the United States’ defender against gay-married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.”

    The GOP race for the White House: ‘severe’ conservatism in the worst way

  43. 43

    LOL! What fool of a speechwriter came up with that line?

    a “severely conservative governor.”

    i.e.

    a severely disabled conservative governor..

    a severely depressed conservative governor…

    a severely ill conservative governor…

    a severely limited conservative governor..

    a severely injured conservative governor..

    I hope Frank Luntz was consulted on that disaster of wording. It might mean the end of that bastard’s career along with the Mittster!

    Wow!

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